Paul Murphy Backs Four-Day Week, Questions 'Compressed' Work

Thanks a lot for the presentations and particularly thanks to those campaigning for a four-day week. I really think it's an idea whose time has come and it brings together actually the interests of workers as workers, the interests of those who are unemployed, fighting for gender equality and in terms of tackling climate change. That's the kind of benefit of the demand, I think, like it really can bring together the interests of the big majority in society in terms of transforming people's lives and society for the better. Just maybe to start with questions for Ms. McElwee of IBEC. In your opening statement you referred to the four-day week or compressed work schedule. Just if you could expand a little bit on what you mean by compressed work schedule. Do you mean fewer hours overall on the week or are you talking about as a potential alternative to the four-day week squeezing the same number of hours hours into a smaller number of days? So someone works 40 hours over five days currently is an IBEC alternative to do 40 hours over four days. Is that what you're kind of getting at with the compressed work schedule model? I think what we have seen is different examples, Deputy Murphy around how organisations have introduced reduced working hours. So we're not particularly advocating for any type of flexibility but I think what we do see in some of the trials and in some of the reduced working hours is that people work a longer working day and then have perhaps Friday off or Monday or whatever the chosen day is. And in other situations they do actually work exactly the same number of hours as they should Monday to Friday or previously did Monday to Friday and then have the advantage of an extra day that they're not working. But there are different ways of doing it and as I say we're not advocating for one or any other in particular. Thanks. Okay and in those cases then when you're talking about the potential to just squeeze the existing number of hours into a lesser number of days, four days for example, would you not be concerned about the potential negative impact on workers' health? I mean in particular workers in manual jobs working for let's say 10 hours in a day as opposed to eight hours in a day? Yes, absolutely. And that's why I say we don't particularly advocate for people working longer days. In fact, we have been working very closely with WRC around the code of practice and rights to disconnect. We're very conscious of the obligations of the working time legislation and very, very conscious around the fact that productive people when you're working excessive excessive hours doesn't really tend to be productive in the long term. There can be times when obviously we all work longer hours to meet a particular demand but on a regular basis it doesn't tend to be terribly effective. So therefore there are challenges around compressing the work week and we do know that from some of the trials that there have been challenges and feedback from employees who have said they found it very stressful to try and work at the increased pace of the shorter working week. But it didn't necessarily fit into certain organisations or even certain departments within certain organisations and that it was better to spread the hours over the full week rather than try and compress the work into four days. But not necessarily to work longer days, but to actually just compress out all the general day to day interaction. So to take out some of the breaks, maybe to shorten lunch breaks, to do away with a lot of the social engagement that actually is very important for people's mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. So, to take out some of the time, you'll see that chat and opportunity to spend some time together and know your colleagues outside of just their particular work interests. Thanks. I mean I think you have a point there. The question is what to do about that. For me, the point about what to do about that is not to have a model whereby we try to extract 25% more productivity from workers on a per hour basis, because precisely workers are already, you know, very heavily managed, their time is very heavily managed in many cases and already have stressful lives. But I think it's to accept that you have a four day week and an employer pays a certain cost for that. So that relates to the other question I was going to ask you. I just finished reading a book by Jason Hickel called Less is More. And he makes the point that gains in labour productivity have been appropriated by capital instead of shortening the working week and raising wages. Companies have pocketed the extra profits and required employees to keep working just as much as before. In other words, productivity gains have been used not to liberate humans from work, but rather to fuel constant growth. And people who have looked at, you know, the evolution of the working, working hours of the past few decades. Certainly we'll see the productivity has increased and yet workers find they continue to work the same amount. And if you look over that period of time at the share of wealth created, say share of GDP or share of GNI going to profit, it has increased pretty much year on year. You go back to 1960 and 32 percent of GDP was going to profit. Now it's up at over 50 percent and proportionately the share going to labour has gone down. Given that that massive increase in profit share that has happened in this country, would you share that assessment that that's what's been taking place and accept that actually a four day week is one way of rectifying that? I think it's probably a much bigger question with respect to Murphy than the issue around how we might trial or implement a four day work week. I think clearly we have seen very significant advances in productivity and how people work, much of which has been augmented by industrialization and technology and new and more efficient methods of working. So I think without a doubt we have seen very significant changes in how people work. I think when we look at what we hear back through member companies and what their employees are telling them is what they're really looking for in terms of their work life balance is around additional flexibility. It's the ability to be able to quite rightly disconnect when their working day is done. It's the ability to be able to flex around childcare, to flex around education, to be able to take maybe time out of the working day or the working year to pursue other interests rather than just one single model. And so therefore, when we're looking at this particular question, we're really looking at whether, you know, what are the best opportunities and then essentially what sustains our economy into the long term. So how do we continue to operate, operate successfully, ensure that we sustain and maintain employment and employment growth. But obviously it has to be in that wider lens of a strong stakeholder model. Thanks. I just finished with a question for the whoever wants to take it from the four day week campaign. Which is that I mean, I appreciate that you're trying to get some level of buy in from employers and convince employers that this can work and so on. And as part of that, you've kind of emphasized that we're not strictly speaking, saying a four day week, three day weekend. We're open to flexibility and so on. And could you accept the fact that, for example, I think there was a study in France in relation to 35 hour a week. And they found that the quality of time away from the job, who controls when it is taking its regularity, usability, etc., is often as important as its quantity. And they found that employees of lower social rank often receive time of lesser quality since they had less control over a scheduling. And so how do you ensure that flexibility isn't used in such a way, you know, which is why the TUC in Britain has said explicitly there for a four day week, three day weekend. Thanks. Anybody want to come in very briefly on that? Sure. So just to address the question around the work intensification over four days. First, we've only two barriers to entry for companies to join this program as it currently sounds. The first is they must agree to participate in the research. And the second is that if a company contacts us and says we want to compress our work schedule 10 hours a day over four days, that is not what we're researching. That's not what we're advocating for. And so, you know, it needs to be in keeping with the general principle of the 180-100 model that we've outlined on this. And I mean, to answer your other question, the reality on this is that both in terms of employees and I appreciate what Maeve said earlier on. So we do think that employees should have choice. IndyCube, a company in Wales that introduced this very successfully for their 15 staff, had one member of staff that because of their own personal circumstances preferred the compressed work schedule. So they preferred the shorter five days than the four day week. And I think giving staff that option is a positive thing. Similarly, most of the studies we've done suggest that 85-90% of staff when they're serving about work time reduction would have a preference for an additional day. And in some companies, it is the case that if you take a small PR firm or communications agency who does project work for other businesses, could they effectively shut their business on Friday and do their work Monday to Thursday? They probably could. But for the vast, vast majority of companies that we're dealing with, this is about, you know, continuing to operate over five days, people having a different day off. It might be Monday, it might be Wednesday, it might be Friday. We've one company involved in the program that actually operates over six days, but their employees have a four day week and they just schedule around that. So we do think that the demand for this, both on the business side and on the worker side, is heavily geared towards one less day and it's heavily geared towards having that three day weekend. But we think that facilitating flexibility within that is probably a good thing. Thanks. Thank you.